" “Those two teachers had to deal with all of us each and every day,” she remembers. “But they made sure that we were not leaving Prospect until we were ready for the next level.” Prospect was Scott County’s only African-American school. It was located at the top of the hill on Manville Road in Gate City, in the communities known locally as Sticktown and Trot. The historic school closed because of integration in 1964, and the recent reunion was the first time the alumni had ever gathered as a group to catch up with one another. ... the new...

As a work of presidential prose, James Buchanan’s inaugural address on March 4, 1857, is widely considered one of the most forgettable ever given by an American leader. As The New York Times put it dryly at the time: “Little if any impression has been made by the inaugural.” Still, it would not take long for Buchanan’s unimpressive inauguration to become one of the most significant in history. For one thing, it was the first to be photographed. It was also the first inaugural given after the creation of the Republican Party, the last before secession and ultimately the last...

As calls mount from both the left and the right for Democratic state Rep. Jovan Melton to step down from his House District 41 seat in Aurora, supporters, including former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, argued Thursday that a double standard is being applied to Melton by the leadership of the Democratic-controlled Colorado House and the Colorado Democratic Party chair, Morgan Carroll. ... Webb ... called out the leadership of the Democratic Party ... “Jim Crow system of justice” and a “political lynching” of Melton. And while they didn’t go so far as to tell African American voters not to vote...

Last month in Philadelphia, a white Starbucks manager summoned police officers to confront a pair of African-American men after one asked to use the restroom before he had purchased a drink. About two weeks later, at Lake Merritt Park in Oakland, Calif., a white woman called police to report a black family that was grilling food for a picnic. In both instances, the victims were accused of violating laws or rules governing conduct in commercial establishments and public spaces. In the first case, it was for trespassing or loitering. In the second, it was for using a charcoal grill outside...

Often in history, the "White American Bible Belt" paid homage to racism while calling it "Jesus Christ," according to prominent evangelical Russell Moore. Delivering a speech at the MLK 50 Conference in Memphis, Tennessee, on Tuesday, Moore drew a parallel between America's struggle for racial equality and the ancient Israelites being told to choose between serving God or serving Baal. "Time and time again, when told they could not serve both, the people of God tragically often chose to worship Baal but to rename him God," said Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "And...

Black activists aren’t satisfied with Florida Democratic National Committee (DNC) member John Parker’s explanation that he meant to say “people of color” but used the expression “colored people” instead. They want him to resign. Parker told Politico that he was trying to say “people of color” but didn’t get it right. Parker’s own wife has joined the chorus of African-Americans and Democratic officials who say the DNC committeeman from Duval County, Florida, needs to step aside. Parker made the remarks on Jan. 22 while speaking at a party meeting in Jacksonville and apologized after the initial uproar from those present...

A journalist from the New Orleans Item trailed a patrolman for a full day in the winter of 1917, providing reporting on what amounts to a century-old police ride-along -- perhaps the first by a newspaper reporter in the city's history. The move came on the heels of several widely publicized police scandals, including the suspension of several officers who pawned their service weapons in 1916 and the killing of police Superintendent James Reynolds by one of his subordinates on Aug. 2, 1917. And questions were being raised publicly about whether rank and file police officers were doing enough to...

Hate is hate, dead is dead. We should stop politicizing bigotry and violence by demonizing some demographics and giving others a veritable pass. The demonstration by white nationalist haters in Virginia last weekend resulted from the removal a statue of confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Confederate flag and statue controversies are raging throughout the South. Some view Confederate symbols as disgusting tributes to slave states defeated in the Civil War. Others warn against censoring symbols of a history we should never forget. On the margins are people who wish the South had won. The movement to eradicate confederate symbols began...

‘We have, by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism’ America is still struggling to overcome its "legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, colonialism, and racism," President Obama told Comedy Central Monday night. Appearing on "The Daily Show," Obama was asked about how he speaks to crowds about race. How does he "skirt that line between speaking your mind and sharing your true opinions on race whilst, at the same time, not being seen to alienate some of the people you are talking to," host Trevor Noah asked. "You know, my general theory is...

Hillary Clinton did something today that is worse than anything Donald Trump has ever said or done. It was pandering. It was gross. And she should be embarrassed. She ran an ad that basically said the KKK will be in charge if Trump wins. Politics doesn’t get any lower than this. There are a few problems with the ad other than how childish it is. Not only has the KKK endorsed Hillary, but Hillary used to be good friends with someone who was actually a member. Flashback time. From Breitbart: In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fondly eulogized Sen....

As was recently shown, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, with its central claim that police around the country are hunting and killing innocent black men, is a lie. Yet the BLM myth is enmeshed within a larger narrative, a narrative of eternal White Racism. And couched within this tale are distortions and outright crucially false ideas of slavery. In the interest of that Â“honest discussionÂ” of race that the Eric Holders and Barack Obamas of the world claim to want, I submit considerations without which no such discussion can be had.One glaringly inconvenient truth that, odds are, few folks...

This is killer Gavin Long a/k/a Cosmo Setepenra's list of books. http://convoswithcosmo.com/man-datory-reading-list/ Note this one - the only one listed related to American race issues: "The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander This is the title I immediately and robotically recite anytime someone is looking for a book recommendation. By far the most infuriating book I’ve read, but vital for anyone that’s looking to understand why the #BlackLivesMatter movement exists. Why Black people are angry. And why the black father is absent in most Black homes (done so intentionally via the system of White Supremacy). It’s an unrelenting and exhaustively...

The nation's foremost Latino civil rights organization is suing a cemetery association in South Texas because a widow alleges the caretaker refused to take her husband's ashes because he was Mexican. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the American G.I. Forum of Texas, which alleges the Normanna Cemetery Association has historically been a "Whites Only" cemetery, turning away Latino and African American requests for decades.

Thursday in New York City at the National Action Network Convention, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Republican governors are trying to “bring us back to Jim Crow days.”

And why she should listen to Killer Mike. At the the Iowa Democratic forum on Monday night, Hillary Clinton took one of the easiest questions lobbed her way -- Who is your favorite president? -- and blasted it right into the back of her own goal. She did fine with the first part, naming Abraham Lincoln, but then dipped into the history of Reconstruction, bemoaning the vengeful way in which the North targeted the South after Lincoln's assassination. You know, he was willing to reconcile and forgive. And I don't know what our country might have been like had he...

Jim Crow laws touched every part of life When All in the Family made its big splash back in the 1970s, I couldn’t see why it was supposed to be a comedy when it reflected the home I grew up in so closely. I looked for cameras outside our windows. Yet I bought into MLK’s vision of a color-blind America. I wanted and still want to see a land where people are judged by the content of their character instead of by any arbitrary circumstances, skin color, social class, nationality, or anything else. In the segregated South and the bigoted...

Booker T. Washington In 1857, the Supreme Court, with seven of the nine justices being Democrat, decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen, but property. Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by Democrat President Andrew Jackson, wrote that slaves were “so far inferior … that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for their own benefit.” After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was adopted Dec. 6, 1865, abolishing slavery in America. Once Southern Democrats were forced to free their slaves, they attempted to effectively re-enslave them by passing “Black Codes” and “Jim Crow Laws” which...

Since we are “cleansing” America of everything Confederate let’s start with the Confederacy’s successors: The Democrat Party. The Civil War was fought over slavery. Only duplicitous liberal apologists say otherwise and their presentations are not very convincing. The Civil War saw Union soldiers who were Republicans fighting and giving their lives to free the slaves held by Southern Democrats. During the War the Democrat Party in the North did everything it could to undermine the Union cause and committed countless acts of treason in order to keep Black people in chains. The Democrat mayor of New York City even tried...